In A Far Off Land: Emma Donoghue’s Astray

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After I wept over the last page of Emma Donoghue’s extraordinary 2010 novel Room, I took a break from reading altogether. The break was more for self-preservation than anything else: Donoghue had managed, over the course of her horrific tale of a mother and child’s sadistic imprisonment and wrenching return to the world, to lock me into a tiny cell, a knot of intensely plotted turns and hypnotic language so tight that other novels could not unravel it. After living in Room, I saw all my environments differently. Locks clicked with more finality, and large spaces suddenly left me gasping for air. I put the book away, fleeing to nonfiction for several months afterwards. Fiction had taken me too deep down the rabbit hole.

So it’s with some relief that I can say that Donoghue’s Astray poses no similar threat. Instead of pulling the reader close into a whispered narrative of despair as she did in Room, Donoghue now throws the windows of the world open in fourteen stories of wanderlust, exploration, and possibilities promised by new and unknown lands. The stories are split into three sections “Departures,” “In Transit,” and “Arrivals and Aftermaths,” and each stage of travel poses questions of why we travel, migrate, and drive forward into new territories, and what cost. Where once she constrained us to an eleven-by-eleven-foot cell, Donoghue’s stage is expansive and generous. She notes in her lovely afterword, that our wanderlust is really about the desire to find our fates: “Travelers know all the confusion of the human condition in concentrated form…Moving far away to some arbitrary spot simply highlights the arbitrariness of getting born into this particular body in the first place: this contingent selfhood, this sole life.”

Each of Donoghue’s storytellers goes on great journeys, yet she tethers them before they — and we — ever know it. Each story, shifting in time and location across the last four centuries, concludes with a note from Donoghue, revealing the factual roots that inspired it. In “Man and Boy,” she shows us the poignant bond between the trainer Matthew Scott and his ward, the famous elephant known as “Jumbo,” just as the future circus magnate P.T. Barnum is making an offer to bring the beast into his American tour circuit in 1882. Donoghue slips, Zelig-like, into each story and embellishes the historical skeleton with perfectly attuned language: as the trainer Scott strokes Jumbo’s trunk, he murmurs, “We don’t mind the piddling tiddlers of this world, do we, boy? We just avert our gaze.” The “based upon a true story” hook makes the stories wildly informative and engaging. It’s not necessarily the case that narrative needs truth for maximum impact, but finding the kernel of reality in each tale makes the bigger tale even more resonant. In “Onward,” a young mother turns from a life of prostitution and wins her ticket to Canada by way of Charles Dickens. In “The Widow’s Cruse,” a young lawyer sees only what he wants to see in a young Jewish widow seeking his help. (Donoghue digs deep into the lawyer’s intentions, giving us the delicious description of his lechery. “The days that followed were full of pleasurable anticipations, and the nights brought scalding dreams. His sheets were dreadfully stained; he had to send them out for laundering.”) Donoghue knows how to employ the very best descriptors, all while perfectly mimicking the tone of her story’s time and place. “The Widow’s Cruse,” set in 1735 New York, sounds just as Edgar Allen Poe might lay it out, perfectly noble on the surface and subtly sinister below, just as “Snowblind” is pulled straight from the mouths of doomed prospectors as they trudge into the frozen Yukon during the 1896 Gold Rush. Jack London would be proud.

Some stories are less provocative than others — the moment of a mother’s journey across the Gulf of Saint Lawrence (juxtaposed with her dying husband on shore), or the story of grave robbers going after Abraham Lincoln’s corpse, fall too much on our pre-established pathos and recognition to move the uninformed reader. But where Donoghue really gets us is in the stories that challenge their very contexts. I found unanticipated humor and intrigue in “The Long Way Home,” the story of Mollie Monroe, a cowgirl who also acts as a bounty hunter for wayward husbands in 1870s Arizona, and who agrees to an unlucky trade with one of her targets. The story’s resolution is unexpected in its modern bravado, and Donoghue’s revelation of its true-to-life source — an apocryphal story about a female bounty hunter later committed for insanity (aka cross-dressing, promiscuity, and alcoholism) only makes it more entertaining. But the most startling of these tales, and perhaps the most consequential, has to be “The Lost Seed,” the account of a settler in Cape Cod in 1639, who begins his time in the New World a good Christian, forgiving and compassionate for his neighboring colonists. “If we do not help each other, who will help us? We are all sojourners in a strange land…in this rough country we stand together or we fall.” But as time passes, “each household shuts its doors at night,” and so the man shuts his heart against his former friends. He is scorned by a girl he fancies, and later turns and accuses her and another woman of lewd behavior, of laying together with “not a hand-span between their bodies. It is time now to put our feet to the spades to dig up evil and all its roots.” It would seem that despite the initial clean slate of the new world, it would only take a single man’s wicked and petty mind to sully the entire enterprise. Once part of a community, he now wanders “across the fields for fear of meeting any human creature on the road. And it seemed to me the snow was like a face, for its crust is an image of perfection, but underneath is all darkness and slime.”

Perhaps travel is what produces the desire to settle down at all, in that finding oneself without territory can be profoundly destabilizing. The same impulse that would drive us to travel, to form new communities in new lands, is the same that would have us cling to our tiny plots and ward off interlopers. Accord and antipathy may grow from the same tree, if the soil allows it to be so. A new home, a new land, promises a chance at new definition, a chance to clear old disappointments away and start again. As Donoghue notes in her Afterword, perhaps written as she tours the globe telling stories, “I don’t know where I am. I peer out the little window at the flat landscape hurtling towards me several thousand feet below, and I think, where on earth is this? . . . Emigrants, immigrants, adventurers, and runaways — they fascinate me because they loiter on the margins, stripped of the markers of family and nation; they’re out of place, out of their depth.” By giving us true stories of wanderers and vagabonds in search of broader vistas, Donoghue has given narrative weight to both the journey and the destination. And in offering up history newly made into stories, Donoghue makes the journey of literary reinvention into its own reward.

Jessica Freeman-Slade
has written reviews and commentary for Full Stop, The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Kenyon Review, and Specter Magazine, among others. She lives in Morningside Heights.

Everyone has had a close relationship that works better as a friendship than as a romance, and at some half-drunken moment of intimacy, everyone has wondered why. “New Year’s” seems a story poised to answer this very human question, and then, for some reason, it simply doesn’t.

Thanks to President Obama and the Academy Awards, Shepard Fairey and Banksy are household names today. But before mainstream media plastered their work across the world, they’d already done it for themselves, rising to the status of contemporary street art royalty: infamous and rich for making illegal and legal artwork that kids cop and celebrities and curators covet. Both artists would admit, however, that they are just part of a continuum. As Roger Gastman and Caleb Neelon, co-authors of The History of American Graffiti, assert in their introduction, “Humans write graffiti.” So true: cave paintings, petroglyphs, and pictographs begat World War II “Kilroy was here” and Bozo Texino scrawls on railcars begat disenfranchised kids “getting up” on any surface they could slick with ink and paint.

Exactly who was the first kid to spread a name or moniker across a cityscape is up for debate, but this book is as close as one will ever get to a definitive answer. A blow-by-blow, regional dissection of graffiti’s proliferation across the United States, relying on first-hand accounts, interviews, mountains of photographs, and a pinch of healthy speculation, Gastman and Neelon have connected the dots to reveal a comprehensive and important story about how doing something as simple as writing your name in a public space grew into a global movement that has left its colorful residue on all aspects of culture, from politics and media to fashion and urban planning.

Common knowledge to those in the know, but perhaps a surprise to neophytes, graffiti as we think of it today started in Philadelphia, not New York. In 1965, yearning for his grandmother’s cornbread while at reform school, Darryl Alexander McCray started writing CORNBREAD on the school’s buildings, vying for attention alongside the names of gangs. Released in 1967, CORNBREAD ran roughshod through North Philadelphia, inspiring others like COOL EARL and KOOL KLEPTO KIDD. Soon, teenagers were canvassing the city with their tags, running in crews, and keeping tabs on other crews operating in different neighborhoods (which eventually led to crews with national chapters, like TKO). KOOL KLEPTO KIDD recalls the first time he met writers from West Philadelphia, “that was really a beautiful feeling because we had been tracking each other for the longest time.”

There is an element of graffiti fueled by conflict – personal beefs, neighborhood disputes, gang rivalries – and while the book does not shy away from these realities, the dominant theme is that kids rallied around graffiti. In fact, as the authors astutely point out, they invented it: “Graffiti can claim something that no other art movement can: it was entirely created and developed by kids.” With the disillusionment fomented by a string of senseless assassinations, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, kids knew that it was up to them to stake their claim in a culture that was both indifferent and inept when it came to bettering the quality of life in the country’s urban centers.

Certainly that is what happened in New York when graffiti really took shape as the city’s finances and national reputation were in a downward spiral. As LIL SOUL 159, a Queens-based writer active in the early 1970s insists, “Any writer will tell you that graffiti tore down the racial barriers of the late 1960s and early 1970s – eradicated them! And you just didn’t see that in New York City until graffiti hit the scene. Once we smelled that ink, we were just writers.” This sense of camaraderie fueled with a dose of healthy competition spawned the highly stylized, audacious lettering that blanketed trains, buildings, billboards, and any other imaginable city substrate so as to spread a name far and wide. Writers prioritized subway lines that covered the most ground. Seeing SUPER KOOL 223 all over the 4 train, which runs between the Bronx and Brooklyn, STAY HIGH 149 decided he had to go bigger and better. This attitude, shared by most writers, resulted in tags evolving from written monikers followed by numbers usually representing streets to more ornate pieces comprising block and bubble lettering, characters, and other visual ornaments.

The same as MTA trains carried a writer’s fame across boroughs, freight trains began to crisscross the county ablaze with the work of writers no longer content to be all-city. The freights let kids who had never been out of state go all-country, spreading graffiti through the suburbs and desolate plains of middle America. While plenty of books have documented the graffiti of New York, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and the primary instigators of these scenes, Gastman and Neelon have dug much, much deeper, covering cities like Chicago and Washington D.C., as well as Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Boston, Nashville, Denver, Alburquerque – the list goes on. In doing so they trace graffiti’s development and make the case for it as a true American art form akin to jazz.

In the 1980s, the documentary Wild Style and the book Subway Art played major roles in establishing graffiti as a legitimate art movement; bolstered by its relationship to hip-hop, writers got their first tastes of celebrity and gallery cultures. At the same time, because of the work they did on the streets, the media clumped Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat with writers like DAZE. Neither Haring nor Basquiat considered themselves graffiti artists, but they did help usher in the era of street art. While traditional aerosol tags continued to go up all over the country, and world, new materials and methods were applied to the streets. Posters, stickers, and stencils carried messages, logos, and more formalized characters. Today graffiti and street art thrive; artists travel the world, receive commissions, sell their art for huge sums, and license their work for ads, sneakers, and video games.

But one person’s hero is another’s vandal. Street art remains illegal almost everywhere. Municipalities actively and aggressively buff people’s work. Visit a wall in some city today and it won’t look like it did back in 1979, 1985, 1999, or even 2004. The carvings and paintings of France’s Lascaux caves and the canyons of the American southwest have been preserved as vital visual records of how early humans externalized interior thoughts. But the graffiti in this book has been painted over or chipped away, though it serves as the foundation for a global art movement that is as much about claiming individuality as it is about visual aesthetics.

This is what makes The History of American Graffiti that much more impressive. Roger Gastman and Caleb Neelon have gathered the origins of a story that up until now have only existed in fragments. For graffiti fans, pieces of the puzzle will be filled in and the riot of never-before-seen imagery will guarantee that this book is always within reach. Don’t like graffiti? It matters not, as this is a worthy read if you have any interest in late twentieth century America because the world we live in would not look the same if it weren’t for bold, creative kids hell bent on making sure that their presence was recognized by a culture that easily could have forgotten them.

Lacar Musgrove Lacar Musgrove is the associate non-fiction editor of Bayou Magazine, published by the University of New Orleans, where she is pursuing an M.F.A. She has a B.A. in English from Boston University.Orhan Pamuk’sIstanbul: Memories and the City is a strange and fascinating self-portrait.The first time I read Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul was on a train from Istanbul to Bucharest at the beginning of a two month journey through southern Europe. I’d been living in Istanbul for a year and a half and was interested in the book not as a memoir but as a book about Istanbul. It’s a strange way of writing a memoir, as entire chapters are dedicated not to Pamuk’s life but to Western and Turkish writers and artists who have depicted Istanbul though painting and writing. Pamuk writes of viewing himself and his city through Western eyes, sometimes borrowed, sometimes, he suspects, his own, recognizing his education and intellectual life as westernized.I was delighted to find many of Pamuk’s observations of Istanbul echoing what I had perceived through my Western eyes. I was particularly amused by this:It snowed on average between three and five days a year, with the accumulation staying on the ground for a week to ten days, but Istanbul was always caught unawares, greeting each snowfall as if it were the first.I cannot tell you how true this is. When it snowed my first winter there and my students refused to come to class, I thought it odd. But the next year it happened again, and the people of Istanbul reacted with the same surprise. It happens every year, and every year they are unprepared.The second time I read Istanbul was for a graduate non-fiction survey course, and it was the inclusion of this title on the reading list that solidified my decision to take the course. Upon deeper study, Istanbul revealed itself as an intricately woven portrait of place, memory and self. Pamuk’s narrative of his childhood and adolescence is confessional and his tone humble as he guides the reader with exquisitely subtle steps through this portrait. He handles the portrayal of his adolescent self in crisis with the same clarity and compassion with which he depicts a fallen empire city struggling with decline. Pamuk invites you into the hüzün, the collective melancholy of the city’s people, but does not break your heart with tragedy. Rather, he allows you to bathe in the comfort of it, to feel the resignation, the longing for a more glorious past as he describes old houses one by one going up in flames, the wealth of the city flowing from the old Istanbul families to the newly rich, a city unable to cling to the past but also incapable of defining a future: paralyzed.So what does this book have to offer one who has never been and may never go to Istanbul? You’ll have to look deep to find it. This is a book about extracting one’s identity from the world, about finding the line between self and society and occupying the place where each is served, finding stasis. In a self-portrait in which self and place are inseparable, Pamuk’s struggle is that of reconciling the two. The history, the geography, the buildings, the people tell him who he is. He recognizes himself as, rather than a unique individual, a character shaped of the collective experience. The habits and possessions of his family are not unique, his hüzün, his melancholy, is not his own but the collective hüzün of Istanbul, his life is not only his life but the life of the city. Young Orhan, however, occupies not only Istanbul but a secret inner world, the solitary world of his daydreams, which he expresses, in childhood and adolescence, through drawing and painting. He is tormented by anxiety and guilt over the separation of this inner world, and when painting no longer serves his need to bring the inner world to the outer, he hits a crisis which is only resolved when he learns to occupy both worlds simultaneously through writing, a moment in which he, unlike Istanbul, manages to disentangle himself from the past, “warmed by the flame of my brilliant future.”Through its theme of inner and outer worlds, the text explores the tension between our sense of self and our sense of how others see us. “Once imprinted on our minds, other people’s reports of what we’ve done end up mattering more than what we ourselves remember.” We know ourselves through our own memories as well as the memories of others. At the beginning of the opening chapter he writes, “This book is concerned with fate.” Pamuk fancies himself unique in his struggle, but I would say his metamorphosis is common if not universal, at least in modern Western societies in which the individual is expected to cultivate a discreet identity and is responsible for harnessing his “true” self in order to fulfill a destiny.I understood Pamuk’s point of view through my own experience, not with Istanbul but with returning from Istanbul to Louisiana, my home and my family and grappling with my claim to this place and its claim to me. Having come to view Louisiana through the eyes of an outsider and myself as separate from it, I found myself confronting the truth of my own identity’s inseparability from place and my need to not only claim but defend it. I empathize with Pamuk’s sense of shame knowing how the rest of the country views our poverty, the ignorance of our citizens, the corruption of our government, the state of our infrastructure. Through confronting the connection between my identity and this place, I can accept this melancholy and embrace and the promise of the past’s claim on my destiny.

The Best of McSweeney’s is a triumph, not only as a stand-alone book, but also (and especially) as a testament to the power of the short story, the essay, the experiment. A tribute, too, to the power of one person’s vision, proof that writers can influence the world outside the borders of their prose.

Aciman views the places he visits – Rome, Barcelona, Paris, Tuscany, and New York, among other locales – not with the wondering, landmark-seeking eye of a tourist, but with the speculative, assessing eye of a potential resident.

The way historical fiction works is by using some basic recognizable details to situate the reader in a time and place (the historical part), and then to imagine the rest, in order to make a narrative (the fiction part). Richard Flanagan’sThe Narrow Road to the Deep North is a fictional account of a historical event — the experiences of Australian soldiers in a Japanese prisoner of war camp on the Thai Burma Death Railway, also known as The Line, in 1943. A plan by the Imperial Japanese Army to speedily construct a railway between Bangkok and Burma, they used, among others, tens of thousands of Allied prisoners of war. One of them was Arch Flanagan, the father of Richard, to whom The Narrow Road to the Deep North is dedicated: “prisoner san byaku san ju go (335).” The prisoners were starved and abused, thousands died.

The imagined details of this book: Dorrigo Evans is a doctor and a colonel of the Australian soldiers in the camp. He is handsome, intelligent, a natural leader, irresistible to every person around him, even his captors. All of his weaknesses come from how good he is, how virtuous: “The more he was accused of virtue as he grew older, the more he hated it. Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.” In the camp, the Australian soldiers die off as they are beaten and starved to death by the rank of brutally efficient Japanese commanders, who themselves have been driven mad by the conditions under which they live. The Japanese see the Australians as useless — oversized, stupid, and lazy — and are annoyed by their constant singing and joking. The Australians see the Japanese as slave drivers, demented by their devotion to the abstraction that is the Emperor. Both believe that the other is morally corrupt in some way. In the vacuum that follows the end of the war, however, all moral reasoning that made sense at the time becomes unfamiliar. The war ends, and everyone who survives tries to fold themselves into the compromise of normal life. There is an epigraph is from Paul Celan, which speaks of the horror of returning to life after deep, specific suffering — “Mother, they write poems.”

Outside of the camp, the most important story is Dorrigo’s love affair before the war, with his uncle’s wife Amy, which took place in a hotel pub in Adelaide. The love affair is stopped by the war, but its memory and the sadness of its failed connection stays around, forming a Shakespearean subplot. The primary subject of this book is human suffering, and all the endlessly interesting ways in which people cause themselves and others to suffer. The strange euphemism “Prisoner of War” eventually comes to describe every character in the book.

The title comes from the travel journal of Basho, the Edo poet. Basho took a long solitary journey north, questioning, in his journal, whether life has any meaning at all. The question of meaning, and whether or not it can be extracted through the study of history, has preoccupied writers of historical fiction over the past fifty years. Authors such as Peter Carey, Laurent Binet, Salman Rushdie, and E.L. Doctorow, have felt the need to meta-theorize or “postmodernize” the re-creation of the past, to question the writing of history and the usefulness of fiction even as they do it. They are preoccupied by the need to tell the difference between the real (unattainable), the true (mostly nonexistent), and the told (unreliable). The conclusion, insofar as there is one, is that meaning and memory are slippery surfaces across which we can only slide.

Part of the problem of meaning, for what might be called the postmodern or “meta” writers of history and historical fiction, is plausibility. That is, the reader being able to believe what they are reading is “true,” (true, in this sense, meaning that it really happened). Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, the French historian who founded the movement of “New History,” began in the 1970s to write history using the first person “I” pronoun, as a way of moving history from story to discourse, and signaling to his readers that they would never read history that hadn’t been written by a human, and therefore wasn’t subject to being falsified by a human imagination. Data are unable to speak for themselves, intervention is needed. History becomes fiction, in this view, because it is narrative. Flanagan presents an opposite pole to this view. This book is historical in every sense; it could almost have been written at the time of its setting, in the 1940s, before the parsing of the horror of the Second World War caused us to reorient our worldview in almost every sphere of life, and to question the very possibility of meaning.

In historical fiction, the world has in some ways already been invented, and the task of the author is to describe it, that is, to fictionalize it. According to E. M. Forster’sAspects of the Novel, “‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.” Writers of historical fiction change story to plot, using description.

The difference between history and fiction, Sir Philip Sidney argued, in his A Defense of Poetry (c.1579), is not what did happen, but what could. It was a rebuttal to those who were suspicious of the power of fiction, from Plato to the Puritans:
Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature.
The imagination required to write fiction, in Sidney’s line of argument, is not gnosis but praxis, and becomes an empathetic force, a virtue. Fiction is “true” not in a historical sense, but in a moral one, exactly because of its inventive power. Fiction, unlike history or philosophy, can create a world that didn’t previously exist, out of the one that does.

Description is where the story is, and also where the postmodern complaint with the story is. It’s where the poetry of the writing is. Those writers of literary historical fiction over the past forty or fifty years who have become fed up with traditional, novelistic historical storytelling have often revived the Platonic quarrel with poetry, in questioning of the usefulness of that leap to fiction. Description, though, is what Flanagan revels in. He is a storyteller in the mythic sense, of lives determined by emotion, error, and turns of coincidence and fate. This book goes from one end of a life to other, with an epic journey and a romantic tragedy in the middle (there are many references to Ulysses; Dorrigo’s life continually marked with poetry). The plot is driven by suffering and desire. Destiny of the characters is the number and nature of words spoken (One of Dorrigo Evans’s tasks is to choose which soldiers get sent on the march and which stay behind, essentially, which ones will stay alive and which won’t, an echo of the Judenräte).

Haiku poetry, the great poetic forms of restraint, is interspersed throughout the chapters, highlighting the overflowing quality of Flanagan’s sentences. His sentences are poetic, even if they lack the precision and control of the poetry that intersects the chapters:
A drop dripped.

Tiny, whispered Darky Gardiner.

The noise of the monsoonal rain flogging the canvas roof of the long, A-framed shelter — bamboo-strutted and open-walled — meant Darky Gardiner could hardly hear himself. The clamor of the rain made such nights only more desolate, worse, in a way, than the days when he was just trying to survive but at least had company to do it with. The jungle shuddering in sheets of noise, the incessant drumming of mud churning as the rain slammed into it, the strange slaps and punches of invisible water runs, all of it he found dismal.

Another drop dripped.
There is an amputation scene that the squeamish will have to divide up and read in shifts, taking breaks in between to hold the open book aside, turn their faces away and gasp for air. It’s all part of the stinking sensuality of Flanagan’s writing. It isn’t enough to be told the story. We sit through it, like a cinema for smell and touch.

His language is ornate:
Dorrigo would sway back and forth and imagine himself shaping into one of the boughs of the wildly snaking peppermint gums that fingered and flew through the great blue sky overhead…he would drink in the birdsong of the wrens and the honeyeaters, the whip-crack call of the jo-wittys, punctuated by Gracie’s steady clop, and the creak and clink of the cart’s leather traces and wood shafts and iron chains, a universe of sensation that returned in dreams.
His dialogue can be dramatic, almost to the point of seeming parodic:
She took a puff, put the cigarette in the ashtray and stared at it. Without looking up, she said, But do you believe in love, Mr Evans?

She rolled the cigarette end around in the ashtray.

Do you?
Yet even when his writing cloys, it still feels sincere, in its faith in the redemptive power of art after tragedy.

Flanagan seems to be at heart a novelist, without interest in questioning the utility of historical fiction, only in using it to create fiction; using one experience to make another. In history, other than narrative, all we have are statistics, and the leap required to get from statistics to history is one of imagination. That leap is where Flanagan lives, as a writer. Belief, as Flanagan shows us, comes not just from accuracy, but from the power of the writing itself. “A poem is not a law, Sir” a soldier tells Dorrigo, known in the camp as Big Fella. “But he realized with a shock it more or less was.” In Flanagan’s books, story becomes true by being poetry. The truth in this book is not that of the historical sense, but in a Keatsian, moral sense. We don’t read historical novels like War and Peace to find out about the French influence in Russia, but for the very pleasure of exercising the imagination — for their virtue.

There is an endearing overabundance of almost everything in this book, which in its enthusiasm, becomes part of the pleasure, though some faith is needed to get through some of the love scenes, and to travel along with the humorless, masculine sentimentality of the hero. Readers of this book should do away with all suspicions, and get ready for an avalanche of feeling and sincerity, or else risk living in the sad restraint of Flanagan’s characters.